Piney's Needle: Maryland Beauty Quilt Block

One of the things that my four generations of quilters have always done is keep scrap books of quilting or sewing ideas. We cut out and paste or put in folders ideas of things we want to try. My grandmother kept some of hers in this Jumbo Scrap Book. She has notes of quilting guilds she attended, who attended and what their projects were. This particular book has the guild information from the early 1930s. Grannie was married, with only one child then, and some of the guild members were her sister-in-laws and her mother-in-law. She was in Texas at the time.

I'm not sure where she got her clippings, but most look like they came from a quilt magazine and for $.10, you could mail off and get the pattern. Some times the pattern was included with a little information about the design, but the directions weren't quite as detailed as we are used to now.

This was the first clipping in Grannie's scrap book, The Maryland Beauty. The directions give how much material would be needed for a full quilt. If you look closely at the pattern, The block was to be 9 inches. Using copies of the pattern pieces, to get a 9 inch block, those half square triangles are tiny!

I decided to recreate some of my grandmother's dreams. My first step was to go to the internet, however I couldn't find any patterns with the half square triangle. I did find what appears to be a cross stitch pattern here. And I also found a variation without the half square triangles here. I found a website which listed all the state block, but no directions here.

Since I had no luck with finding a good pattern, I made my own. I wanted my half square triangles to be at least 1 inch, so....I made my own pattern using a 10 inch square finished block. I divided the pattern into sections and marked where my HST would be.

Then I erased the extra markings on the pattern.

And added the HST placements.

The clipping suggested making the small triangles in light blue and then doing the HST in assorted colors, all on white, quilting with a curved feather in the large open space. I added some color to my pattern just for fun. Then I made some plastic templates for the triangles, tiny, small, medium and large.

Because I already had some HST made from this fabric, I went ahead and used a similar blue fabric for the small triangles and the background from the same background as the HST.

I pieced the HST (4) first, then the strip of 3. To the strip of 3 HST I added the small triangle and then attached the strip of 4. Oh, there is a tiny triangle at the top of each strip.